Private Eye was 50 on Tuesday. There was no sporting reference in that primitive debutant issue of 25 October 1961 – six corny homemade pages printed on yellow paper – but over the following half-century the magazine has significantly cast its wittily baleful eye over the prolix and self-important pomposities of modern professional sport and thank heaven for it.

It happens I was in on the history from the start. Those first scraggy issues through that harsh winter of 1961-62 were produced in artist Willie Rushton's bedroom in his mother's house in Scarsdale Villas, off Kensington High Street. I dossed down in a bedsit in adjoining Marloes Road – catching a Greenline bus each morning for shifts on the Slough Observer – and Willie and I occasionally laughed and drank in the Princess of Teck local; that summer of 1962 we watched the Pakistanis at Lord's and had a memorable day together at the Wimbledon tennis.

We were all of an age and down the years I got to know Willie's other three cofounding Eye Salopians, who also enjoyed their cricket. In time I was to be captained on a few occasions by eccentric but commanding Richard "Jardine" Ingrams and flagrantly run out by Paul Foot to end one of our stylish opening partnerships (five), and I've contentedly lolled in a deckchair alongside Christopher Booker at Taunton, putting the world in order and watching his poor old Somerset lose yet again.

As well as Tottenham Hotspur, Cook was passionate, of course, about his Neasden FC – and all hail to the memory of bluff chairman Buffy Cohen, 67; tight-lipped, ashen-faced supremo Ron Knee, 59; Baldy Pevsner, Hernandez de Pratwinkle, and fearless one-legged custodian Wally Foot, each "boswelled" by ace backpager EI Addio and, on the terraces, cheered on by the "heaving throng" of Sid and Doris Bonkers.

In Private Eye: The First 50 Years (£25), the spankingly appealing and classy new anniversary biog by Adam Macqueen – a rewarding must for any Eye devotee – eminent staffer Barry Fantoni laments Neasden FC's sad death because Ian Hislop "seems not to be interested in football nor knows anything about it".

Happily, "Pseuds Corner" thrives. It goes without saying I'm an honoured club member. Our champ and inspiration has, since 1978, surely been fabled Spectator music critic Hans Keller: "At the end of the Don Giovanni duettino, the unity of the Siciliano rhythm is achieved by a complimentary contrast, not unlike the performance of wordless logic displayed by Trevor Brooking at Upton Park on Saturday."

Trivia snippet: football instigated in 2009 the Eye's (now tedious) Pseudo Names column – when Carl Isleunited wrote to complain how football was infiltrating everything, a sentiment at once echoed by Ray Throvers and Lew Tontown.

Colemanballs has long outlived the broadcasting career of eponymous founding father, David, the BBC's squawking town crier to a few generations. It began in 1977 when an RA House of Nuneaton wrote to Ingrams suggesting the column after noting Coleman's "You can tell how bright the sun is by the length of the shadows." So was born an imperishable cultural staple. My cherished famous five – Peter West at Wimbledon: "Miss Stove seems to be going off the boil"; Frank Bough handing "over to the ringside where Harry Commentator is your Carpenter"; Hugh Johns's "The crowd is urging the referee to blow his watch"; swimming's Alan Weekes: "It's still Britain's Brian Brinkley in last place, and he is obviously quite content at this stage to let America's Mark Spitz set the pace"; and football's Alan King: "Swindon started very, very brightly till the achilles heel which has been biting them in the backside all year suddenly stood out like a sore thumb."

Coleman himself – happily still with us and 85 last spring – still insists he never actually uttered the majority of gaffes he was alleged to have made, but when, a year ago, editor Hislop quietly dropped the "Coleman" from the column's title I reckon us old-timers were almost as sad as, secretly, the enduring old Coleman himself for it must be rewarding to know you've left your name to posterity on the title of a column which, just about every other fortnight, produces a classic line – like last month's "not one of the Arsenal players surrounded the referee" (Alan Shearer), or James Cooper on Sky Sports only last week "Dzeko is accused of throwing his bathwater out of the pram".